Product description

"Neither right nor left but ahead" is the only political course for maverick journalist Sam Smith in this entertaining, myth-busting guide to a new American crossover politics. Witty and profound, opinionated and informative, Smith has important things to say to politically disaffected Americans of all stripes. This primer gives hope that the coughing engines and stripped gears of American democracy can be made to work again if we can recover our can-do spirit and practice a politics of common sense and common decency combined with a search for common ground. In chapters such as "How to figure out why you need this book a diagnostic test for political deficit disorder," "How to stay alive a poker player's guide to the environment," "How to find things out despite the media and other obstacles," and "How to get along with other Americans living next to 250 million people who aren't quite like you," Smith conjoins hilarity and wisdom, education and provocation, giving us what we need to fix America and have a good time while we're at it.

Author information

Sam Smith has "the longest-running act on the off-Broadway of Washington journalism." He edits The Progressive Review and authored Shadows of Hope: A Freethinkers Guide to Politics in the Time of Clinton.

Review quote

"Smith offers a community based, participatory politics that's neither left nor right wing but the whole bird... His work is truth-seeking, independent, fair-minded, and debunking." -- Colman McCarthy

Editorial reviews

Droll, no-nonsense prescriptions for the body politic, by the editor of the Progressive Review. Smith (Shadows of Hope: A Freethinkers Guide to Politics in the Time of Clinton, 1994) offers numbers of specific, hands-on ideas for citizens intent not on fixing but on "transforming and replacing the system. . . that controls America," injecting it with new levels of democracy, common sense, and compassion, so that the system, now dominated by large, entrenched interests, "serves and does not rule." The pace tends to be hectic, as Smith surveys everything from the national debt to the need for new kinds of sewer systems, offering both brief summaries of the problems and succinct suggestions for remedies. There is an abundance of (clear) lists and statistics, and most of Smith's analyses are presented as terse, often witty, paragraphs. That makes the book eminently browsable, but sometimes confusing. Insights are tossed off with abandon, and it is, at times, hard to tell what Smith thinks is important and what merely amusing or outrageous. Nonetheless, a useful, stirring, and ingenious guidebook for perplexed citizens. (Kirkus Reviews)